This sounds like a late night TV infomercial, I gained xxx yada with this secret formula!
So you quantified your gain through countless hours of testing in controlled environments and logged it all and just didn't have the time to type it up and present it yet?

Yeah Rawr is not perfect but neither are the other tools, but they all indicate that the difference between the two stats is not something you will notice without SO many hours of controlled testing that it's really irrelevant.

My DPS fluctuates a lot even on the same fight, if I take the time to look at why it normally comes down to getting procs or OoC casts at the right time or in a disproportionate amount.
Take this normal NRB kill as an example, I was the half tank for this kill meaning I tanked the stationary worm yet I still topped the meter. This also happened to be our first heroic NRB kill night and I remember thinking, "I wish I had an OoC run like this on heroic."
So lets split out the crazy OoC run, this link is just the Gormock part of the fight. I'm 175k clear of second place and it isn't because I'm amazing or everyone else sucks. If you take the time to look it up you will see that I had 19 OoC procs in 105 seconds of combat, that isn't normal.

Each stat is going to be situationally better. The link to the fight you provided may have been a good bit for agility, and you specifically noted that your OoC procs were higher than anticipated.

You talk about your dps in relation to your guild, have you looked and compared to other ferals throughout the world? And then looked at their gearings?

Also, reading back to your first post, I may have misunderstood, were you talking about gemming for the soft cap with your grim toll or going for the hard cap?

Short answer, I did test, no I didn't post it. My testing was for personal use, I didn't feel the need to screenshot it and post it because all the theorycrafting supported my change, it was simply proving to myself that the change was worth it.

There are things you can do to improve the value of the change. For example, save berserk for when your ArP trinket procs, so your shred spam does maximum damage. On fights with AoE, ArP boosts your swipe damage.

At the end of the day, there are those of us who swear by ArP, and those who favor agility. I merely repeated the numbers that theorycrafting has provided, suggest that rawr not be used as the bible, and it feels like you are criticizing me.

I'm not sure when you switched to ArP, Mielikinna, but going through WoL reports (did you know how easy it is to browse guilds/players?), you did the best damage to Jaraxxus-normal on the earliest log you have of the fight (i.e, over a month ago, 9/30) and have gotten progressively worse since. In addition, your ups and downs correlate very well with your Rip uptime, which in any case is sub-par. If you switched gems before that, then the proof you had for yourself was before the 3.2.2 ArP nerf.

If your testing was "for personal use", please don't reference it as your evidence and expect any credibility from it.

Of course, ArP has a higher relative weight on any fight where swipe is a benefit. And depending on your gear setup, it can be the best stat for your gear (but at most by .2 DPS per stat point).

On many of the Jaraxxus fights I looked at, the fights lasted 3:30 or so, but you only Berserk once. In other words, by trying to time your Berserk on that fight, you've been routinely throwing another Berserk away at the end of the fight.

Finally: no theorycraft that I'm aware of says that the difference in 242 stat points is more than about 25 DPS. Some theorycraft does say that you'll see variability week-to-week and parse-to-parse much greater than 200 DPS, and ArP tends to stay closer to the mean.

Thank you Allev, I knew these things already. I have a need for improvement in my alt spec quite a bit.

Agi makes the rotation easier by increasing combo point generation. I simply have been low uptimes on rake and rip, as you pointed out. There are no excuses to be made, only a need to do better.

This is what I'm refuting. For this claim to be correct, every piece of theorycraft would have to be inaccurate on only ArP by a full order of magnitude. All of those things that you "know" back up my point.

Your in-game single-target DPS hasn't improved by 200 points, unless you did it when ArP was worth more than it is now. And even then you wouldn't have been that much.

However, you've ignored that the log from September that I got 2 berserks in due to it being a longer fight. In no fight since have I gotten 2 berserks.

My rake uptime increased and my rip uptime decreased.

I attribute the change in dps to the lack of a second berserk, and to changes in the fight, whether more or less time on adds, any threat issues, positioning, fire, etc. All the normal parts of a fight.

Also, this is the Cat DPS Guide for Dummies. If I answered a question wrong, I am glad to be corrected so that I may become a better player. However, taking the effort to go through my logs and use them to discredit what I say does not determine whether it is right or wrong. Lets get back on topic to answering questions and helping.

"It depends." On which theorycraft you trust, your current gear level, and so on. That said, I haven't seen one gear setup or the other take a clear advantage (more than 100 DPS) in any situation. The only situation I'd consider it is when obtaining a double-[Death's Verdict], and to do so requires depriving a guildmate of one.

Still, can u recommend using High passive over softcap + trinket?

I never raid naxx25 or ulduar anymore these days, would be alot easiër not to get a ArPen trinket.

any other cats that have experience with this? What rating should you have before gemming to aim for a high passive rating? (not softcap + trinket)

thanks

You dont have and wont have arpen proc trinket. So the comparison of hardcap vs softcap is irrelevant for you. What you want to know is since when is arped better than agility.

I dont know for sure, but i'd say that 500-600 arpen from gear is reasonable number to switch to arp gemming.

Note: dont expect wonders. I doubt the difference between agi and arpen gemming is big enough to be visible "by eye", unless you get close to the cap.

Thanks for you reply. So it'll prolly be worth it once i get 900-1000 rating with Gems and buffs.

Do you recommend farming naxx or ulduar to get that ArPen trinket?

Really depends if you want/need hit. Generally speaking, the Runestone is better so I'd recommend farming Ulduar for it.

Hit rating turns out to be not that important in the simulators. In practice it can be psychologically nice to ensure a highly regular rotation, but what trinket would you replace Grim Toll with? If you're gearing for arp then there's really no contest. When I was arp (I switched to agi), I ran with about 90 hit and still topped the meters; you just have to pay a little more attention.

Grats on topping damage meters but this is in no way related to what he's saying. Grim toll is a downgrade if you are at the hitcap without it.

Just wanted to say a big thank you to all the people on EJ and elsewhere who helped me with this project. Feel free to tell me how bad my rotation is or how often I screw up in the movie. I never claimed to be an outstanding WoW player. But I think this movie guide stands up pretty well against the competition ...since there isn't any.

CB05 Guide: How To Feral DPS RELEASED!

Number of bad words in this movie: 6
This is not for the elite of the elite.
This is for the average feral dps player who wants to improve and learn how to continue improving long after she's forgotten about this video.
English is my third language, doing voiceovers was a pain.

Viddler.com - Guide: How To Feral DPS FULL MOVIE
YouTube - Guide How To Feral DPS part ONE of two part ONE ONLY
YouTube - Guide How To Feral DPS part TWO part TWO ONLY
FILEFRONT Download Guide How To Feral DPS.mp4 FULL MOVIE

Please EMBED this video by copying the following html code and pasting into your forum or website:

Wordpress embed code:
If Murna thinks it's good enough, feel free to put it in the OP. Or not. Thanks for a great thread, by the way. Stole a bunch of your ideas. EDIT - Never mind, looks like he's going inactive.

EDIT: Seems I recommended a feral blog (Flyv) that just went non-WoW a while ago. Should've recommended Fluid Druid instead. Oh well.

You probably missed my post one or two pages ago, when I announced my inactivity.
Well, meanwhile I'm quite sure I'm not going inactive, but instead just making a break of one or two months.

The movie is quite good. The only point I have: It's too fast! Even for me, who knows what you're talking about, its really hard to follow. Especially when there are these "fun sounds" or multiple images at the same time.
Just slow down basically the whole movie for better understanding. But that's just my opinion.

I will update the first post and add a link to your movie.


Another topic:
I was thinking about casting GotW when at low energy and while waiting (because all buffs and debuffs are up and running). You'd lose 1second + lag of autoattacking, but gain a nearly guaranteed clearcast for shred. I can't see how this wouldn't be a DPS increase.

Yep. I'm a native Swedish speaker, have zero experience doing voiceovers and was desperately trying to keep the length to below 20min and still getting all this stuff packed in - ended up editing my voiceovers sentence-by-sentence to cut out a lot of deadtime. Probably could've cut out a lot of sections, too. But right now there's no other feral dps guide videos out, so better than nothing I suppose.

A few things I got wrong:

Berserk macro should be a two-step macro, one that alerts the DK, and one that you can pop for Berserk AFTER you get the buff. My bad. I know there's ways to make macros do one thing on the first click, and another on the second. I'll be working to make a Berserk macro like this, unless someone has a better solution. I'd prefer not to have two buttons for this... UI overload long ago.

For reference, this is a convoluted sound control macro someone on the UI & Macros forum made for me (I barely understand it), which works on a two-press basis:
Feel free to share your solutions to this issue.

FRONT PAGE WORLD OF RAIDS!
World of Raids | Guide: How To Feral DPS, Guild Recruitment Updates, New 24 Slot Bag

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Several great new class guides for raiders | StratFu

Incidentally, people are screaming bloody murder about my Imp Mangle recommendation, but I'm pretty sure it's generally best since there's way too much movement, dynamic positioning fights, attacking low-health adds while running - or running through to the backside of the boss etc not to take it. I spec for progression fights, which means things go wrong and the Arms Warrior sometimes dies or is attacking something else.

Again, thanks for a great thread.

Instead of the sub-optimal Berserk macro in the movie, I now propose this as a two-step solution regarding notifying the Blood DK:

#showtooltip Berserk
/use [nomod:shift] Berserk
/stopmacro [nomod:shift]
/w Kastille BERSERK A GO GO!
/ w Asreif BERSERK A GO GO!

1. Ensure you're in a good position/time to Berserk.
2. Hit Shift + Macro to notify Blood DK
3. Get Hysteria, verify.
4. Hit macro again to properly launch a fully Hysteria'd Berserk.

Been trying to follow this closely and do my research. Have a question about set bonuses.... 2T8 + 2T9 or go for 4T9?



Seems like it's saying 2T8 + 2T9 is 'best'.

4 x T9 > 2x T9 + 2x T8

It depends on whether you're using 232, 245, or 258 T9. The short answer is, 258 gear (set pieces or not) is better than 2T8. 2T8+2T9 is better than 232 T9 in two slots. 245 T9 is roughly equivalent, and will depend on exact gear and slots you've chosen.

I could not get my hands on either one of the two ArmPen Trinkets yet. But mmochampion released the loottable for the heroic 5 man IC dungeon recently, and behold, a new trinket quite similar to the already known is coming.

Needle Encrusted Scorpion will be dropping, so my hope is finally up again.

Tremjon

Figure out how to use Rawr. That will be better long-term advice than anyone else here will give you.

In reply to your post: Two post above yours, I said this...

Ditch your 232 T9 set items for 245 T9 set items. If you have spare T8, switch any of those items in for your shoulders/gloves/legs so you can get the 245 T9 helm. Keep 2T8/2T9.